When it comes to morality, there tends to be a distinct dissonance between the real world and video games. For the most part, in video games morality is presented as a series of True or False statements. I can either be good and save the victim from thugs, or I can be evil and join in on the victimization. And that’s if the game is being subtle with its choices.

In reality, morality is based on your actions to thousands of different stimuli, and for the most part is considered grey. But when it comes to programming, the easiest way to present/code anything is to think of it as a series of 1s and 0s, on or off, good or evil. In more recent years, the player is presented a neutral option, but for the most part that comes about through inaction, and usually results in no player rewards. Being all good or all evil results in far more prizes than being indifferent.

The next stage in developing the morality play games would be to introduce more grey into the worlds.

Okay, so here’s my idea for a cyber bullying morality game. It’s a text based game where you’re presented a chat window and an AI and you have a conversation with it. The AI talks as though it’s a pre-teen, so slightly annoying/obnoxious and doesn’t ever really have its facts straight, but is really interested in keeping the conversation going. The way that you interact with it changes its personality. So if you’re nice it’ll be happy, if you try to explain things that it gets wrong it will slowly learn, if you’re mean it’ll become depressed. If you’re mean to it long enough it will eventually commit suicide.

The longer you play with the AI the more you learn about its character. Perhaps it comes from a battered home, or is a spoiled brat. Randomized stats could start the AI out as a low self-esteem mid-westerner with an interest in cooking or a rich southerner who has an abundance of friends but needs a pen pal from another state as a class assignment.

The game ends when the conversation(s) end, either by death, disinterest, arrest (sexually flirting with a pre-teen is illegal), loss of internet access, or some randomized event in the characters life. Later installments could include in the randomized chatter creator a feature that the person you’re speaking to is actually a perv or a cop.

The idea would be that instead of having morality on a sliding scale it would be a circular graph, with multiple overlapping sections. There isn’t good or evil, just a lot of gray. Although based on your actions, the ending you received could be considered good/evil but for the most part would lead to ambivalence, much like online conversations in real life.

There has been talk of getting rid of the whole morality scale in games and to just allow our actions be the deciding factor, much like real life. I feel like that’s being lazy. Without feedback from the game world, our actions would be meaningless, much like in the real life. I think the further we develop our AI characters, the more important it will be for those characters to have multiple responses to our actions, especially since interaction and versatility are two of the strongest characteristics of this genre of art. And for this to work, at least in this point and time, it will require a value scale of some sort.

In the future, I envision companies who specialize in this sort of middle ware, allowing game developers to focus on setting up a story/world and having it populated by teams of programmers working with sociologists. But for now, I guess we’re stuck with saving or stabbing prostitutes.




An Aside: Morality in multiplayer games is a moot point; everyone’s a dick when it comes to playing with other humans.